Project Description:2012 Mount Holyoke College GameJam In March, the MHC CS department hosted a 24 hour coding extravaganza where students teamed up to create the best interactive game they can muster. This pilot event gave MHC students the chance to experience the video game production pipeline from pitching to developing a finished game, all in less than 24 hours! We were fortunate enough to have involvement from local game company HitPoint Studios (the largest independently owned game company in Massachusetts). During this event, nine interactive games were created, some of which were displayed at the HitPoint Studiosâ€™s Open House.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session)(Extracurricular Projects)

Analysis and Visualization of Astronomical Images in FITS Format Using MATLAB

Presenter:Katie Weil, sophomore at Brandeis University

Team Members:Katie Weil with Coauthor: Michael Kosowsky, Sophomore, Brandeis University Research Mentor: David Roberts, Brandeis University Class Instructor: Antonella DiLillo

Website:

Project Description:The project was designed to speed up the image annotation process and analysis of a Flex- ible Image Transport System (FITS) files for use in astronomical visualization. The exist- ing process is time consuming, and requires the user to write with Post-Script and switch between many different cumbersome applications. We created a MATLAB package that contains scripts that have the ability to plot astronomical images from FITS data, calculate arithmetic operations on the plots, and allow the user to make simple annotations on the plots.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session)(Project from an upper level class)

BranQ

Project Description:The idea behind â€œBranQâ€ is to have an easily accessible reservation system for the Brandeis University Escort Service. The service is open to current Brandeis students, who log in using their UNet credentials. Once logged into the service, students can look up route information for the Escort Service, and reserve seats online for the campus and Waltham vans. Additional functionality includes the ability to change or cancel reservations, view route details, and receive current travel advisories. Currently, the service handles reservations through a dedicated phone line, which is answered by a single operator located in the Brandeis main gate information booth. The operator then relays the reservations to the van drivers via CB radio so they know what stops they have to make. BranQ would enable students to make reservations by navigating to an easy to remember URL, and reserve available spots on upcoming vans. The BranQ operator-facing site will enable the operator to manage the reservations, with functionality for the operator to input reservations received through the phone line, and view a list of upcoming vans, how many people are on each van - and between which stops - so that they can notify the van drivers of their pickups. The main goal of this concept is to make it easier to make real-time reservations for the BranVan online, instead of waiting on hold over the phone, as well as making the operatorâ€™s job easier and less error-prone. Eventually, BranQ will evolve to promote more sustainable transportation, by increasing awareness of the program, easing the communication between the student body and the Escort Safety Service, and motivating more students to use this campus-provided transportation. The project began as a Human-Computer Interaction project where we followed the steps to create a user-centered design from the beginning. This process included drafting different usage scenarios, outlining stakeholders, organizing focus groups, and designed walkthroughs and prototypes. For each scenario, we analyzed walkthroughs using Gestalt principles, GOMS analysis, surveys, and interviews with stakeholders. Finally, we have used this design to begin developing the actual application using PHP.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session), demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

CampusBash

Project Description:CampusBash.com is a user-driven web-service focused on campus events. The site is a hub for events on all campuses and through a social-networking aspect that offers a central spot to find out about events on other colleges. The site also has a calendar to help plan out events, as well as a rating system whereby users can grade events and the hosts of events on a letter based scale. The events that show up on the homepage are linked to a map to show where they are and are also linked to a check-box system with categories to help limit what events are shown. Users can toggle between schools they are affiliated with to see the events happening at other schools. The only thing that is required to see the events at another school is a â€œBashPassâ€ which is acquired by friending one person at another institution. The problem we are aiming to solve is that of social complacency, the craze of sitting in ones room and not interacting. Students are not fully reaching their social potential in college. With CampusBash, students would be able to make new friends, leave their rooms and actually explore neighboring campuses and other college cultures.

Project Description:Scientists use technology ubiquitously to collect and process data. They often use software to handle massive datasets and produce scientific results, which they post on the web, making them readily available to the public. Flaws and differences in the way data is collected and processed can impair its usefulness for interpretation. To ensure the authenticity and reproducibility of that result, as well as to improve the result by incorporating corrections in its processing, it is essential to be able to trace the provenance, or history, of the results. Data provenance is defined as the information describing all entities - procedures and data - that were involved in producing a result. We aim to create a software tool that provides provenance for scientific data analyses. The major issues in this research are collecting, persisting, querying, and visualizing the provenance. The amount of data provenance is usually massive and challenging to present in a meaningful way. The focus of my work is on persisting provenance and developing the interface for interesting queries so that they can be made by a non-programmer. We are using the example of a hydrological study at the Harvard Forest which measures stream discharge as a function of other quantities. We use a definition of the process written in the graphical programming language Little-JIL to generate a graph (Data Derivation Graph or DDG) documenting the provenance of the data for each process execution. We store the DDG into an RDF (Resource Description Framework) database, making it available for querying. We provide a GUI that allows the scientist to query the provenance data without becoming an expert in database technology.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session), 10 minute presentation(Senior Honors Thesis or Project)

Car Ramp Physics App for iSENSE Dataviz System

Project Description:The Internet System for Networked Sensor Experimentation (iSENSE) is web system for collaborative scientific inquiry. The iSENSE site enables users to describe their own scientific experiments, upload and share data, and create and save dynamic data visualizations. I have designed and created a single-purpose Android application, named Car Ramp Physics, that collects Y-accelerometer data at a rate of 20 Hz for 10 seconds of a vehicle traveling across a plane or incline. Upon choosing to upload the data to the iSENSE site, users can statistically analyze their data using one of iSENSEâ€™s many visualization features, including a table, histogram, scatter plot, and more. They may also compare their data with data from other sessions, including those uploaded by other users.

Control Mechanism in the Frequency Domain

Project Description:By making a control mechanism act like a driven oscillator, we expect periodic overshooting in both directions with a constant amplitude. A common way to make this mechanism settle on some steady-state solution is to add in a differential term, which would make it act like a damped driven oscillator. Instead of using this old and well-known formula, known as a Proportional-Integral-Differential (PID) controller, we intend to control the function from the frequency domain in a novel way. Since the controller is oscillating so simply, it should have one sharp peak in the frequency domain. Once we know the frequency, we can apply an out-of-phase signal to the output that will make the controller settle on the given state.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

Developing software with Ruby: McKennabot, Specs

Project Description:I have two projects I've worked on - McKennabot and Specs. McKennabot is, as you might have gathered from the name, a bot - it scrapes content from a Facebook page ("What's Happening at Clark") using the Facebook API and puts it out on Twitter (it's been deactivated due to some server issues we were having within the department, but I hope to have it back up before NEUCS) Specs is a tool for evaluating one's academic progress towards a degree - users access a website and select courses they've completed at Clark, and are then given back a list of what requirements they still have left (as well as a helpful list of suggestions for next semester)

poster (which you will explain in a poster session)(Senior Honors Thesis or Project)

Doppio: Implementing a JVM in the Browser

Project Description:Doppio is a project to get Java running in the browser without any plugins. Right now it comprises a fairly complete VM and an implementation of the javap bytecode disassembler. It is written in Coffeescript, a language which compiles down to Javascript. Doppio started out as the mid-term project for a Graduate Systems Seminar. It has since taken on a life of its own, and is complete enough to run implementations of GNU Diff, LZW compression, and the Java 4 compiler. It implements all 200 opcodes, emulates Java's primitive types, and supports generics, file and standard I/O, as well as major JDK libraries such as String, Pattern, and HashMap. We believe that it is the most complete in-browser implementation of the JVM to date. We faced several challenges in our implementation. To port the Java Class Library, we had to re-implement the native methods, which are Java's points of contact with the underlying system. Since the browser cannot actually make system calls, we emulate them in the browser itself, creating a simple filesystem backed by LocalStorage and a console interface to do standard I/O. We also had to work around numerous 'impedance mismatches' between Java and Coffeescript, such as the lack of static typing, a different concurrency model, and the absence of several numeric primitives in Coffeescript.

Frogger

Project Description:Frogger was the "big" culmination project for my Fundamentals of Computer Science 1 course. We spent roughly a month developing, testing, and redesigning the game. My partner and I wrote all the code for the game from scratch, and we went back to rewrite parts as we learned new functions and more efficient ways of performing functions. A further description can be found on the webpage. https://sites.google.com/site/caronj93/projects/frogger

demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

Giraffe Adventure

Project Description:Ever thought, "WHAT IF I WAS A GIRAFFE?" Now you can BE ONE!! Meet Jeremy the giraffe who was STOLEN FROM AFRICA and brought to America to be displayed IN A CAGE at the zoo. Finally, the time has come to MASTER YOUR GIRAFFE SKILLS and navigate Jeremy back to his family! Use your jumping skills to DODGE ANGRY CROWS! Use your SWINGING NECK to BATTLE JUMPING NINJAS. Download GIRAFFE ADVENTURE today on any ANDROID device and have an unforgettable adventure!

demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an upper level class)

Google Bombing and Network Manipulation

Project Description:In our increasingly interconnected and technology-oriented world, people have come to rely heavily on the internet for acquiring information on important issues. As empowering as this tool is, our reliance on it as a major information source renders us vulnerable to a unique kind of information manipulation: network hacking. One kind of network hacking, termed â€œGoogle bombing,â€ has attracted particular media attention. Incidents such as the â€œmiserable failureâ€ hoax (in which this term produced results that included President George W. Bush and, later, Barack Obama) have alerted us to the susceptibility of our immense web to calculated hackers and to people who have an interest in biasing the general knowledge pool to suit their own social or political agendas. In my presentation I will discuss research in which I was involved that investigated the phenomenon of network hacking. I will present an overview of this topic as well as the evolution of the algorithms that drive it, and will also discuss likely defensive algorithms used by search engines to try to outmaneuver hackers. Finally, I will present hopeful evidence that, at least for the time being, hackers mostly seem to be kept under control.

Project Description:Goru Events is an iPhone app based social network which displays events that are occurring near the user. It uses GPS to determine the user's location and then asks a server for nearby events. Events are categorized by group which allows group admins (such as a universities or businesses) to create private events which only group members can access. Users can also create their own groups and events which they can share with the world or restrict to group members. The technical side of the project involves a highly efficient event search algorithm running in the server as well as the server's interaction with the app itself.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session)(Project from an upper level class)

Gotta Go 2 Deis

Presenter:Alex Munoz, sophomore at Brandeis University

Team Members:Alex Munoz with

Website:

Project Description:The program I used to create the game was Blender, it is a interesting program that I believe this program should be taught in schools all around the states. The reason why this game is interesting is because the player gets the opportunity to play the role of a shuttle driver, that drives around the brandeis campus. The player is able to see building from campus in the game. The game is also difficult because the player must avoid hitting orange cones, if not, the player lose and game will restart.

demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

Introduction to Computing Through Animation

Presenter:Catherine Feldman, first-year at Clark University

Team Members:Catherine Feldman with Professor Li Han from Clark University mentored my progress.

Project Description:Guided by enthusiastic instruction, my classmates and I explored the basic concepts of programming and code using Scratch, a program developed by MIT. The program offers immense flexibility, including challenges and stimulation to both new and veteran users. Through personal experimentation, I created several projects that combine the structure of coding with the artistic novelty of animated "sprites" to instantly bring computer science to life. My progress and development can be clearly seen as my projects become more complex, illustrating an advancement in understanding the fundamentals of coding. The process has educated me in many ways, and inspired in me, an amateur in the field, an excitement and appreciation for computer science.

demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

Project Description:Description: App Inventor is an open source application maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which allows everyone, regardless of their programing experience, to create mobile applications for Android phones. With App Inventor, students in an introductory computer science course at Wellesley College (CS 117: Inventing Mobile Apps), created several Wellesley-specific mobile phone applications. For example, I made an application named Exchange Bus Buddy. Exchange Bus is the bus that transports students between MIT and Wellesley College. Exchange Bus Buddy helps the users to find the nearest bus stop from their current location--by using the GPS function on the phone--and provides walking directions to the selected bus stop. In addition, users can take pictures of their favorite study spots on MIT campus and add these locations as new destinations to the destination list in Exchange Bus Buddy. Besides the Wellesley-oriented apps, the students in class also made applications for daily life. Sarah Xu â€™15 created an application named Take a Moment. Take a Moment allows the user to preserve joyful moments in their lives, by taking pictures, writing short journals and pinpointing locations. With Take a Moment, the users can now easily retrace the Thai restaurant in which they enjoyed a wonderful dinner or review the funny joke their friends told last week. With Take a Moment, the users will never lose any wonderful moments. Sarah and I will demonstrate a few more mobile phone applications that we made in this class, in addition to a live demonstration of how App Inventor works. We will also bring posters and answer questions regarding our mobile applications and/or App Inventor.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session), demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

Project Description:In recent years, we have seen the computer and technology industry become more intertwined with the automotive industry. Cars in the consumer market can now park themselves, alert drivers if they become too close to another vehicle and even connect to the Internet. With all these advancements, we have chosen to develop image recognition software, which could assist an autonomous car (a car designed to drive itself). Our software is able to take a given image and determine whether or not a fire hydrant is in that image. This could allow an autonomous car to know whether a perspective parking space is next to a hydrant and therefore illegal. The proposed image recognition software will combine several existing recognition techniques: the Fourier-Polar-Fourier Transform method for a rotation and translation invariant feature extractor, David Loweâ€™s SIFT algorithm to detect important feature descriptors, and the VIBGYOR color segmentation procedure to segment the image by color. The proposed method combines these existing algorithms to create a database of silhouetted images through a segmentation process, which will be used to â€œtrainâ€ the software to recognize the appropriate shapes. Once the software has been properly trained, it will take in an image and will attempt to recognize a fire hydrant in the image.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session), demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an upper level class)

Project Description:Bridge is an entertaining card game enjoyed by many, particularly senior citizens. In addition to being enjoyable, playing bridge involves a large amount of strategy and challenges the player's memory. Studies have shown that such mentally engaging games can help prevent the onset of dementia. Unfortunately, bridge is almost totally inaccessible to those with significant visual impairment. I am working with Professor Barbara Lerner to develop a bridge game accessible to the visually impaired. My bridge game makes use of RFID, or radio-frequency identification, technology. When a playing card with an embedded RFID tag is passed over an antenna, it transmits a unique identification number to the antenna. The antenna transfers this information to a computer running a Java program, which then speaks the name of the card. By listening to the computer's audio output through an earbud, the visually impaired player can hear the cards as they are dealt and played. Meanwhile, the visually impaired player can also query the game about its state by pressing buttons on a standard numeric keypad.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session), 10 minute presentation(Senior Honors Thesis or Project)

Market Pricing

Presenter:Greg Bodwin, junior at Tufts University

Team Members:Greg Bodwin with Eric Friedman (Faculty, School of ORIE, Cornell University) Scott Shenker (Faculty, Department of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley) Both deserve credit for the work, but neither will be in attendance.

Project Description:Our project consists entirely of theoretical research into Datacenters and Cloud Computing. When many agents vie for a cut of the same pool of computing resources, a central algorithm must decide how to "fairly" distribute them. A natural solution is to allocate an artificial currency to all agents, then sell the resources on an open market. We investigate the practicality of this method and come up with some good news and some bad news for pricing. First, the bad news: it's impossible for any price-based algorithm at all to be both Pareto Efficient (i.e. all resources are given to someone; none are wasted) and Strategyproof (i.e. no agent can ever make gains by buying up a resource they don't need and throwing it away). Now the good news: with market pricing, there are upper bounds on how non-strategyproof a system can be, and evidence from a simulation suggests that, with many users, the possible manipulations to the system are negligible in the average case. Our work fits nicely into the developing field of Cloud Computing, and has implications for economics and game theory as well as Computer Science.

Project Description:Meta is a robotic pet that also functions as an alarm clock. It can be controlled through a webpage. At the time set online by the user, he will run around and sing songs. We designed and built the first prototype in six weeks using an Arduino board, a Wi-Fi shield and a wave shield. Due to the flexibility and variety of the petâ€™s appearance, it can be designed and marketed as many different products for different purposes such as school souvenirs, gifts etc. In the future, more features will be added to this prototype.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session), demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

Mine Sweeper

Project Description:My classmates and I were introduced to the Scratch program this semester as a means of learning general computing skills and logical step by step thinking. This project was created in response to our final Scratch assignment where we were tasked with putting all of our Scratch knowledge to the test to create either a game or story. I decided to make my own version of the game Mine Sweeper, i had an image of the game in my head and started by making the detector work in response to the movement of the users character. I next added the mines, the issue i ran into was marking the mines only when the character was close to them.I needed to do this to avoid all the mines being marked once the user clicks the spacebar. Once i had a working version i spent the next few days fixing bugs and expanding the game so that mines start in a different location every time and are a particular distance from each other. The goal is to locate and mark all ten mines placed on the map without touching any. The user moves there character around the map and as they get closer to a mine the detector will change colors. When a user is close to a mine they can hit spacebar to mark the mine with a flag, once all ten are marked the game is over.

demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

Motion Simulation of Geometric Constraint Structures

Presenter:Felicia, senior at Mount Holyoke College

Team Members:Felicia with Faculty Advisor: Audrey St John

Website:

Project Description:Motion simulation is a classical problem in areas of research such as CAD (Computer Aided Design), robotics, and protein folding/flexibility. While sophisticated motion simulation techniques exist, most have computational limitations. Rather than relying on current, computationally expensive techniques, we worked to help elucidate the intricacies of structural motion by using geometric constraints to model the structural interactions. This level of abstraction has facilitated the development of more efficient motion-simulation techniques, by means of allowing the incorporation of methodologies from other domains, such as the video game industry, in particular, algorithms based on â€œragdoll physics.â€ We developed a software tool to simulate the motion of geometric constraint structures along with new strategies for doing so. We also analyzed the experimental results from applying our different techniques, and compared them to some current methods, specifically those of ragdoll physics. For certain classes of structures, we found that our techniques outperform existing ones. These results indicate that our work may lead to algorithms that improve simulation for molecular motion.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session), demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Senior Honors Thesis or Project)

Project Description:Traditional search utilities leave the user without their desired results in real world usage. The end-user will run multiple random unsuccessful searches with no idea what is wrong or how to (re)-submit their parameters for relevant information. In a real world application, computer servers are slowed down by a massive number of search requests, eventually increasing the time needed to find the information. To address this issue is to solve a search request just as an end user would complete a project of different type, by bringing the related files from a program to another, to bring related files into similar programs that offer different resources, and bring the related files into different features of the same program until the project is finished. We propose a solution that has entirely been written in BASH, C, PERL, PHP, SQL, JAVA-script, JQuery, and HTML for processing such searches. The solution gives the end-user a database search and a document file search through a nonstandard web interface. The database search uses graphical preferences to filter website attributes into relative results until the search ends. The document search uses multiple techniques bringing the search request from one independent technique to another until the results are achieved. The database and document searches themselves are changed into by the end-user preference during searches. A demonstration of the search utility is available with the poster on the laptop.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session), demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Research Project)

OpenStim:a DIY brain stimulator

Project Description:Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation(tDCS) is a technology that has been used since the 1960s to modulate brain activity and treat conditions like depression and anxiety. Since then, advances in stimulator and imaging technology have allowed the technique to be leveraged in more contexts, including the safe enhancement of cognitive functions in healthy adults. Despite these advances, commercial tDCS stimulators have remained expensive and unavailable outside of a few laboratories.Cheap DIY tDCS projects have sprung up, but they often sacrifice safety and reliability. The OpenStim project is an attempt to create a safe, easy to assemble, and versatile tDCS device for less than $50. It can be built with only two off-the-shelf components and automatic safety monitoring ensures that it can be operated by an inexpert user. OpenStim's schematics and software are freely available for use and modification under a Creative Commons license.

Opnpool

Project Description:Opnpool provides a platform that makes it easy to find, create, and converse with all the groups you care about. We focus on eliminating the factors that make group communication time consuming. With an intuitive chat system structure, you can efficiently communicate with your groups, whether it be your friends, classmates, or colleagues.

Project Description:Zach Wahls is a seemingly ordinary, red-blooded American from Iowa -- an Eagle Scout, an engineering student, and an entrepreneur. What makes him extraordinary isn't the fact that he happened to be raised by a lesbian couple -- he jokes that the biggest impact that left on him is "I'm really good at putting the seat down" -- but instead is his articulate speaking ability and passion to fight for a more just society. He brought these gifts to the floor of the Iowa House of Representatives to defend the state's same-sex marriage law, and the video of his speech went viral to the tune of 18 million YouTube views. As Innermost Labs, my partners and I are collaborating with Zach to turn his brush with fame into a movement that will fan the flames of equality. Our task is to coordinate simultaneous dinners with straight ally couples hosting same-sex couples and couples on the fence with the idea of same-sex marriage. We hope to make sign-up as quick and non-intrusive as possible. We're creating an updating map to watch the movement spread across the country. We want to make instant file-sharing convenient and provide enough report-back mechanisms so all observers can read our story of success as its being written. In doing so, we're not just creating one successful event; we're solving the problem of how use mobile and web technology to coordinate distributed, simultaneous events.

Porting Blender Games to Mobile Devices

Project Description:Mobile Gaming has significantly risen as a result of the surge in Smart Mobile Devices. As Game Developers strive to keep up with this upward trend, it is imperative that Game Development remains convenient and independent of the platform where the game is to be played. We are conducting research on a better way to port games developed by Blender Â® to both android and iOS devices. This research richly benefits from the ongoing open source development by the libGdx community. Developers now not need to worry about how to incorporate their game design into these smart devices as we provide a platform that handles all the complexities involved. We have succeeded with porting simple Blender games to the Android OS and will be working towards a working bridge between Blender and iOS. Our creed that â€œthe future is mobileâ€ shall be upheld until proven otherwise.

Project Description:In this report, we present a platform for use in a system of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capable of human assisted-autonomous and fully autonomous flight for search and rescue applications, to improve the speed, efficiency and safety of search and rescue to benefit both the victims and the rescuers alike. This system also alleviates the need for large teams of rescuers to divide up to search vast areas of land were a stranded victim could be. To accomplish this, the system was designed to incorporate light, long endurance UAVs, equipped with specialized search and rescue sensors to aid humans in the search for lost hikers in mountainous areas. The ability to search from the area, without putting additional humans at risk is invaluable for search and rescue. All UAVs in the system utilize the Paparazzi autopilot system, which is an open source, Linux based autopilot package for flight stability and autonomous control. The system was engineered to follow a centralized command structure, revolving around a specially outfitted UAV, the mothership. The mothership performs path planning and injects target waypoints into the autopilot system. To date the Paparazzi autopilot system has successfully collected telemetry data from a flying RC plane, and the plane has flown with the autopilot system on board through manual and partial stabilization modes. In addition the Paparazzi system can connect to multiple autopilot boards located on separate planes and can receive the separate planes telemetry data. Waypoints can be inserted into the flight plans of the planes from an external source during runtime to support a mothership system design.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session), demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Senior Honors Thesis or Project)

Prototyping a Rhythm Game with Max/MSP

Project Description:Max/MSP is a visual programming language designed for music and multimedia applications. A Max/MSP program consists of a set of self-contained programs ("objects") arranged and linked together on a visual canvas, mimicking an analog signal chain. For this project, I have used Max/MSP to develop a prototype of a rhythm game. This game processes an audio signal in real-time, detecting impulsive sounds and generating patterns for the player to drum on a USB-connected drum set. This project is an exploration of audio processing, game design, and the advantages and disadvantages of using Max/MSP for rapid prototyping.

Robot Control via Tablet and SmartPhone

Project Description:This project controls a robot from a distant location using a tablet or smart phone, while also connecting two-way audio and video to provide a full telepresence experience. Telepresence is only one application of this technology; the software and hardware are easily adapted to control a variety of other robots with vastly different applications. The infrastructure is composed of an Android tablet connected to a Freeduino, which is in turn connected to the motors and servos of the robot. An Android application running on the tablet is controlled remotely through a website.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session), demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Research Project)

Scratch Game -- Space Station Defender

Presenter:Daniel Reichenbach, senior at Clark University

Team Members:Daniel Reichenbach with Maria Shteinlukht '12 David Siegel '12

Project Description:My classmates and I were introduced to the Scratch and Alice programs this semester as a means of learning general computing skills as well as the processes needed for animation. We met several times searching the Scratch website for a project we wanted to "Remix." finally we came to a game called "Skeet shooter," a take on a classic shotgun game. We searched the internet for interesting "sprites" characters and objects for our game. After that we went about discovering all of the bugs in the programing we had downloaded from MIT. We then began swapping out sprites and adding our own twists and storyline leaving us with what you see today.

demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

SocialTradr

Project Description:SocialTradr is a social analytics project that presents a new way of organizing keywords, and serves as a demonstration of real-time processing and analytics of social media messages.

Software Agitation of a Dynamically Typed Language

Team Members:Austin Noto-Moniz with Gary Pollice, Professor of Practice

Website:

Project Description:My work applies software agitation to a dynamically typed language, namely Python, in a tool called PyStick. Software agitation is a relatively young idea, coined by a company named Agitar Technologies. Amongst their products is AgitarOne Agitator, which combines automatic test generation and dynamic invariant detection into software agitation. When fed a program, Agitator will statically and dynamically analyze the code to generate a multitude of valid inputs, trace variables through execution over each input, analyze these traces to detect invariants, and report the invariants to the coder. Unfortunately, Agitator only operates on Java, a statically typed language. Thus, I ventured to apply this technique to a dynamically typed language, and chose Python. My intent was to follow Agitatorâ€™s recipe as much as possible, knowing that deviations would be required to account for Pythonâ€™s dynamically typed nature. I also made a couple of different choices that made more sense for my implementation, of which the most consequential is invariants over type information. Since Python doesnâ€™t provide us with any, it makes sense to give the programmer as much information about their type usage as possible. At the present time, return type(s) are reported, and there are plans to report type information at more points. As a prototype tool, PyStick does not operate on the entirety of Python. However, it has proven to be quite successful at handling its defined subset of Python, both in terms of the Agitator techniques and my own.

Solving and Graphing the SchrÃ¶dinger Equation in One Dimension

Project Description:The SchrÃ¶dinger equation serves as the basis of quantum mechanics, describing the behavior of any particle as a probability wave given by a wave function Î¨(x,t). Once the SchrÃ¶dinger equation has been solved, the properties of Î¨ give the particle's probabilistic distribution of position and momentum as well as its possible energy states and time-evolution. The form of Î¨ depends on the potential, V, to which the particle is subject, which determines whether the particle's state is bound or scattering, whether it undergoes harmonic motion, and what energies the particle is allowed to have. This project studied solutions to the SchrÃ¶dinger equation in one dimension and graphed the various wave functions and their squares, which give the probability distribution of position, in order to visually augment an understanding of the underlying physics. Our first approach was to solve the simpler time-independent SchrÃ¶dinger equation for the stationary states Ïˆ(x) of an arbitrary potential, V. We first examined potentials that we have studied in physics class, such as the infinite square well, the harmonic oscillator, the delta potential, the finite square well, and the barrier potential. We then experimented with various other potentials we had not studied previously and examined the time evolution of the wave functions corresponding to each potential.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

Solving for Optimal Life-Time Consumption and Retirement Age

Presenter:Asaf Meir, sophomore at Brandeis University

Team Members:Asaf Meir with Other project member: Andres Shahidinejad Research and Faculty Mentors: Antonella DiLillo and George Hall

Website:

Project Description:Understanding people's savings and consumption decisions has long been a topic of academic research and public policy interest. In this paper, we discuss the addition of retirement choice variable to a dynamic life-cycle savings consumption model. A well defined life-cycle model that solves the retirement problem for a single agent can help estimate the size and growth of retired and working populations. This is relevant to social security and pension funds who foresee complicated population dynamics. We have improved upon a model that solves the savings and consumption decision based on a given retirement age, by making the retirement age an endogenous decision within the model.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

Space Guy Adventure

Project Description:For one of our assignments we create a game where a green space guy tries to get through a maze without being eating by big red teeth. In one of the rooms the space guy has the ability to gain back all of his life. In another room the space guys gets a weapon to destroy the teeth and to get into the boss room. The boss fires fireballs at random places on the game. If the space guy can destroy the boss than the game is over and the player has won.

demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

Speech Tempo Calculator

Presenter:Kevin Smith, first-year at Boston University

Team Members:Kevin Smith with

Website:

Project Description:The Speech Tempo Calculator is technology analyzes speech, calculates the number of words spoken, and tells the user if he/she is speaking too fast/slow. This technology, after being further developed could be a tool used to in public speaking classes, to quantify progress. It could also be used in classes where students are learning English as their second language as a tool to help students work towards a general speaking rate.

demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

Project Description:Studifi is a collaboration platform for students. It allows them to browse through people and teams available within their classes and thus request each other to team up. Studifi makes suggestions based on schedule matching, and in the future on aspects of their profiles too. Every team created obtains a collaboration space with scheduling, file sharing, chat and more. Studifi is more than just a collaboration site, it allows instructors to manage their courses and students, create assignments, post grades etc. It really goes beyond a course management or collaboration platform. It's a social academic platform. Studifi is in the cloud so universities don't need to provide hardware nor staff, hence saving money and risk.

Project Description:Trying to coordinate with your friends to go to the same event at a conference or even deciding which event to attend is difficult. Thus, we have developed a mobile application for the Android platform to make event planning simple and social. We have specifically designed Tanner Connect for Wellesleyâ€™s largest annual conference, Tanner, but this app can be easily adapted to fit any database. With Tanner Connect, users can easily search for and share information about events, effortlessly choose an event to attend based on who has confirmed to go, and connect with other users by leaving and responding to comments on the eventâ€™s page. With our mobile app, anyone can find a way to connect with everyone, all at the click of a button.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session), demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

Project Description:The Artemis Project targets girls at the critical age when the disparity between males and females in the sciences becomes most pronounced. According to statistics from the National Center for Women in Technology, in 1985, women earned 37% of CS degrees. By 2009, this number had decreased to 18%. By opting out of IT-related fields, women are missing valuable opportunities to shape technical innovation and to work in one of the fastest-growing professions. In order to reverse this trend, Artemis aims to cultivate both ability and confidence within these young women so that they are encouraged to pursue computer, engineering and IT fields. Artemis sparks the interest of girls by making fundamental topics in computer science fun and engaging, incorporating lessons with hands-on activities as well as real-world applications. We hope that our students will leave Artemis with both the practical skills and the conceptual background that will help them succeed. The Artemis program aims to introduce rising 9th grade girls to the creative thinking and problem-solving skills that are at the core of computer science, and to cultivate both ability and confidence in participants so that they are encouraged to pursue careers in computer, engineering and IT fields. The program is designed to target girls at the age when their interest in CS typically starts to wane, and to give them the opportunity to experience firsthand many different applications of CS and technology. Artemis achieves its goals by: (1) showing the participants that many topics in computer science are interesting and understandable, rather than dull and intimidating; (2) introducing the participants to a community of young women who are confident in their abilities and successes in a field in which they are a minority; and, (3) providing participants with opportunities to meet other like-minded, intelligent girls with whom they can share their scientific interests, ideas, and experiences.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session)(Extracurricular Projects)

The Emergence and Maintenance of Signaling in the Sir Philip Sydney Game

Presenter:Pinar Ozisik, senior at Brandeis University

Team Members:Pinar Ozisik with Kyle Harrington, Jordan Pollack

Website:

Project Description:In the study described here we analyze the Sir Philip Sydney Game, a signaling game known to exhibit a number of interesting dynamics. Firstly, we examine the emergence of signaling from non-communicative origins. We describe the difficulty of reaching multiple types of equilibria from initially non-communicative populations with an infinite population model. We then compare the ability of finite populations with typical tournament selection to approximate the behaviors observed in infinite populations. Our findings suggest that honest signaling equilibria are difficult to reach from non-communicative origins. Secondly, we incorporate social tags into the finite populations to examine if honest signaling equilibria emerge and maintain for longer periods. We use tags as a measure of relatedness among members in a population. We then use this relatedness measure in our calculations for inclusive fitness, describing the survival and reproductive success of the members in a finite population. We analyze the evolution of populations under different population distributions. We support the claim that inclusive fitness theory may not be sufficient to explain the evolution of cooperation. While cooperativity through honest signaling is sometimes achieved with tag-based relatedness, we suggest that the importance of tag-based mechanisms may not simply be due to their role in kin selection.

Project Description:Tile self-assembly models describe both mathematically and computationally the ways in which small square tiles can attach to each other to form larger assemblies. Two such models are the abstract tile assembly model, in which all tiles attach to one main assembly containing a â€œseed tile,â€ and the two-handed assembly model, in which there is no seed tile and tiles can attach at any time. I present results showing that the seed-based assembly process of any tile set that assembles under the conditions of the abstract tile assembly model can be simulated by the assembly process of another tile set in the two-handed model that is only a constant scale factor larger and actually requires a lower â€œtemperature,â€ a characteristic that describes how easily tiles attach to each other. This result is surprising and interesting, and provides insight into the relative fundamental computational power of both models. This work has direct applications in DNA computing, where biologists are using these models to self-assemble pieces of DNA (represented abstractly by tiles) into structures at the nanoscale level.

10 minute presentation(Senior Honors Thesis or Project)

Toxic Tour App for iSense Dataviz System

Project Description:The Internet System for Networked Sensor Experimentation (iSENSE) is web system for collaborative scientific inquiry. The iSENSE site enables users to describe their own scientific experiments, upload and share data, and create and save dynamic data visualizations. The Toxic Tour App being showcased was created for the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), which organizes walking tours of environmentally hazardous sites in Chicago. When citizen volunteers go on the tour, they use the Toxic Tour App to record observations, which are uploaded to the iSENSE system for storage and analysis.

Project Description:Chlamydomonoas reinhardtii (Chlorophyta) is a species of single-celled green algae capable of extracting energy from both light and carbon sources. In carbon-poor environments, the cells respond and migrate towards light sources of certain wavelengths. The Samadani Lab (Brandeis University, Dept. of Physics) has shown that in the presence of uniformly distributed blue light, cell aggregation near the focal plane of the light source occurs. Conversely, in the presence of red light, cell trajectories appear to exhibit random motion. It is our hypothesis that these cells will exhibit motion consistent with random walk statistics. In this work we track cell motion and confirm its random walk behavior in the presence of red light. We have used a 20 second video segment (890 grayscale image frames) of chlorophyta in motion on a microscope slide in the presence of uniformly distributed red light.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session)(Project from an upper level class)

TurtleBlocks: Blocks for Constructing Tangible Turtle Tracings

Project Description:Seymour Papert introduced turtles in Mindstorms and Logo with the intent of lowering barriers to programming and providing a rich environment for constructionist learning. Turtles allow novice programmers to create intricate patterns through simple commands. Although the relative simplicity of turtles creates an accessible environment for programming, new programmers often encounter frustrations with syntax. TurtleBlocks is a block-based programming language, similar to Scratch and App Inventor, which eliminates many syntax frustrations by having jigsaw-like pieces that strongly suggest how program fragments should be composed. This allows users to create programs that generate interesting shapes without worrying about making basic programming errors. TurtleBlocks boasts the unique ability to create physical manifestations of turtle designs out of various materials using laser and vinyl cutters. This is accomplished by using Javaâ€™s constructive area geometry capabilities to determine the boundaries of turtle drawings, and then converting these boundaries to cutting instructions for the laser and vinyl cutters. This feature sets TurtleBlocks apart from other block-based turtle programming environments, such as TurtleArt, that focus on creating colored pictures. TurtleBlocks was designed to continue Papertâ€™s agenda for turtles by further lowering barriers to programming and providing a richer constructionist environment that includes tangible and digital artifacts. Additionally, TurtleBlocks will increase the accessibility of Wellesley Collegeâ€™s laser and vinyl cutter to members of the community. We are conducting a series of TurtleBlocks workshops for users of different age groups, programming and artistic backgrounds. Additionally, we will use feedback from the workshops to improve the TurtleBlocks language and interface.

demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Research Project)

Understanding Poverty Traps: The Solow Model with Endogenous Population Growth

Presenter:Maya Tydykov, junior at Brandeis University

Team Members:Maya Tydykov with with Jonathan Chu and James Chin Faculty Mentors: Antonella DiLillo, George Hall

Website:

Project Description:In this work, we use the Solow model with endogenous growth to investigate the effects of population growth on the wealth of nations over time. The Solow model with endogenous population growth predicts that all countries eventually reach two stable steady states of capital-to-labor ratio, a measure wealth. One steady state allows for persistent wealth increase as population growth is kept in check. The other, stable steady state represents a poverty trap that occurs when growth in population is disproportionately greater than the growth in income. This phenomenon causes the level of capital per-capita to decrease back to level of the poverty trap. We postulate that developing countries remain poor due to poverty traps whereas developed countries have reached the steady state that allows for persistent growth. Our solow model simulates this phenomenon over time. We compared the data from our simulated countries with data for real countries found on the website www.gapminder.org. Statistical tests to find correlations between steady state capital per-capita, income per-capita, savings rate and population were performed to determine how well our model reflects real-world data. This allows us to measure the significance of independent variables on a simulated country and its steady state. In the future, we plan to incorporate varying levels of total factor productivity into our model.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

Using Rigidity Theory To Identify Hinge Joints in Proteins

Project Description:Proteins are the key players in the biochemical reactions that occur to keep us alive. They function through motion, which results in a conformational change. Proteins can be classified according to their motions, which tend to correlate with particular types of function. We focus on the class of â€œhinge proteins.â€ These proteins contain hinge joints, which allow motion resembling the opening and closing of clams. Using rigidity theory, we model the protein as a mechanical structure, which allows us to analyze its potential motion. In previous work, this approach successfully identified hinges in CAD (Computer Aided Design) models (reference the fall workshop poster). However, our results indicate that steric hindrance in proteins present a significant challenge.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session)(Senior Honors Thesis or Project)

Village Mufusa

Project Description:Title: Village Mufasa. The Story: This is a wonderful world of Mufusa, an African village. Thus, the goal of the game is to eat 16 oranges within a minute. Once the avatar eats all the oranges before the time expires, you will get a win screen saying congratulation you won. If you do not get all the 16 oranges before a minute, than you will have to to start the game over again. The Aesthetics, i.e. Setting and Characters: This game is taking place in the west coast of Sahara in Africa. This occurs around the 1600's when missionaries first came across Africa inquest of gold, diamond and all kind of resources. They first settled down by building beautiful houses. However, in this game the missionaries are represented by the avatar and the African resources such as gold, diamond, silver...etc are represented by the oranges. Therefore if the missionaries get to eat all the oranges, Africa will be dry and consider as a third world in the future, but if they missionaries fail, Africa will just look as beautiful as the present-day United States of America.

demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an Intro class)

Vogueable - What is your style?

Project Description:Last summer we enrolled into a super intensive Android Development course. Here we learnt that the art of app design, implementation, and publishing to the market. To fulfill the course, we had to come up with an idea and convert it into an app in a very short period of time. The idea that fashionistas spend time on the web browsing fashion items that disinterests challenged my team to come up with an algorithm that learns your taste and only lets you browse what items you'd love to see. This algorithm was rapidly transformed into an android app that I demo today.

demo (using your laptop during a poster session)(Project from an upper level class)

Walk Recording App for iSENSE Dataviz System

Project Description:The Internet System for Networked Sensor Experimentation (iSENSE) is web system for collaborative scientific inquiry. The iSENSE site enables users to describe their own scientific experiments, upload and share data, and create and save dynamic data visualizations. The DataWalk application was designed to incorporate the GPS sensors innate in most mobile Android devices in order to record and autonomously upload changes in the user's geospatial coordinates. Upon stopping the recording, users may choose to visualize their data on the iSENSE site, examine specific data points individually, and compare their walks to those of other users. Users can analyze their data on iSENSE to determine their traveling speed and recall where they visited.

poster (which you will explain in a poster session)(Research Project)

iHart - Interactive Hallways for Attraction and Retention in Technology

Project Description:The Interactive Hallways for attraction and retention in technology (iHart) project at Mount Holyoke is designed to make interactive technology both more accessible and to raise awareness about computer science around campus. iHart consists of two parts - a backend server which interacts with the lastest build of the OpenCV library, responsible for "seeing" the people who wish to interact with it, and a flash/java event API which allows for easy iHart integration in projects. This past semester iHart played a central role in Mount Holyoke's first annual GameJam, where Computer Science students gathered for a period of 24 hours to program various games in collaboration with Hitpoint Studios, a local game development company. Future iHart events around the Mount Holyoke campus include a Five College GameJam, an iHart Club geared towards engaging students in programming outside of the classroom, and an outreach program to introduce high schoolers to programming and technology.